0:00
/

Illustration by
Richard A. Chance
Diagnosing autism with Catherine Lord
In this inaugural episode, Lord discusses her entry into autism research, what the future of the field might look like and how drama club saved her in high school.
By
Brady Huggett
1 April 2023 | 1 min read
Catherine (Cathy) Lord is distinguished professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. She co-developed the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and the Autism Diagnostic Interview — key diagnostic tests for autism. In this inaugural episode of “Synaptic,” Lord discusses her entry into autism research, what the future of the field might look like and how drama club saved her in high school.
Read the transcript.
Recommended reading

Timothy Ryan on his pivotal switch from studying particle physics to decoding synaptic transmission
By
Brady Huggett
1 October 2024 | 70 min listen
Explore more from The Transmitter

Long-read sequencing unearths overlooked autism-linked variants
By
Natalia Mesa
18 September 2025 | 6 min read

This paper changed my life: Dan Goodman on a paper that reignited the field of spiking neural networks
By
Dan Goodman
17 September 2025 | 5 min read
Cite this article: